I Forget

When my children were little, they named me "Miss Forget" because they noticed that I had a hard time remembering things.  Like the saintly mother than I am, I laughed when they called me this because I was in no position to argue with them.  I frequently forgot lunches, appointments, playdates, essential items from the grocery store, and where I had put things during my occasional cleaning binges.  I would also forget things like Hubby's lifelong aversion to onions and follow a recipe to the letter only to have him eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner.  I have come to realize that "forgetting" the onion problem was passive aggression on my part.  Those early years had their rocky moments.

The Operating Principal in our home was that anytime something went missing, Hubby and Daughters 1 & 2 would accuse me of throwing it away because to them cleaning meant tossing even though I was always extremely careful not to toss anything important, like a report card or math binder.  Cleaning binges being binges, after all, I goofed once in a while and threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  Of all the things I inadvertently threw away, none was of particular importance or monetary value in the grand scheme of things, they were instead bits of clutter that had special meaning to their owners which I had failed to appreciate.  Every time this would happen, I would beat myself up for being an insensitive and overbearing matriarch, and proceed to empty out the trash bins while vainly searching for the missing objects, praying for God's mercy so that I could get out of the doghouse.  On a couple of occasions I did find the items in the trash, but most often they would be long gone.  My sins, however, were never thrown away:  they resided on a list which Hubby and Daughters 1 & 2 would recite from memory as proof that what they could not find I had obviously disposed of.  Unfortunately, I could never remember any of the times that I found the items they had accused me of throwing away, so for years I felt quite defenseless.

The other thing I did during my cleaning binges was to Organize the House and this involved finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place.  My three nearest and dearest compete with each other to be in the Packrat Hall of Fame to the point where they sometimes border on hoarding.  This upsets me because it is impossible to clean a cluttered house and when I am in a mood to clean, I let nothing stand in my way.  I have tried various methods of corralling the clutter such as boxing stuff up and storing it in the attic, basement, or garage to see how long it will be before anyone asks for their most precious scrap of paper or Pokemon eraser.  Once, after a box had sat undisturbed for three years, I looked through the contents and tossed it.  The very next day, Daughter #1 asked about that little rubber chicken she had gotten as a party favor in kindergarten which I had just found inside the box which the trash collectors had just picked up.  Of course I lied about it because if I hadn't looked in the box, I wouldn't have known the little rubber chicken was inside.  My penance for telling this lie was that Daughter #1 was hysterical and demanded that I turn the house inside out to help her find the damn thing.  For those things which I assumed had some value to their owners, i.e., they were in the top layer of clutter, I would attempt to stow away in a logical place with the hope that I would remember where to look when asked.  Unfortunately, I could never remember which Organizing Principal I was operating off on the day when I did the stowing and so the item would remain lost until months or years later when I found it while de-cluttering, re-organizing, or moving.

Why is my life so much more complicated than everybody else's?

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved

Weed (s)

The Red Dog

I am not sure why I bother to weed my garden beds because the weeds grow in much more quickly than I can pull them or kill them with Roundup.  I even have help of the canine variety.  The Red Dog loves only one thing more than the swimming pool, and that is helping in the garden.  He is the reason why my house is not and never will be clean (another of my opportunities to practice being Sisyphus).  He is also the reason why my white jeans are permanently stained with large paw marks.  I used to go right around the twist when The Red Dog "decorated" my clean white jeans but now, I no longer care.  The reason I no longer care is that I no longer go anywhere that requires my looking clean and put together, so when The Red Dog comes at me wearing his mud suit and boots, my cammo pants hide the evidence.

Sometimes I use weed-pulling as an excuse to avoid doing things I do not want to do, like cooking dinner, going to the grocery store, cleaning the house, or working in my office.  When Hubby comes home and there is no dinner on the table, I tell him I am saving us tons of money by doing manual labor rather than hiring someone (who really needs the money) and suggest that he get us a pizza from Enzo's.  When the overdue notices start showing up in the mailbox because I have been "too busy" to sit down and write checks, I hide them and then have to spend two solid days in purgatory (my office). It is a good thing that Hubby doesn't get involved with the household accounts otherwise I might have to get a "real" job.

Then there are those opportune times, during tropical storms and 100% humidity, when I voluntarily go to the office with every intention of paying the bills and filing everything away that needs filing and shredding everything else, but decide to check FaceBook instead.  This takes an inordinate amount of time (all wasted!) and makes me want to do some writing in order to get my focus back so I can attend to the high priority tasks languishing on my my desk.  The unfortunate thing about writing is that once I start, I can't do anything else until I am finished -- no matter how long it takes.  It is a little bit like weeding in that way, which leads me to wonder whether writing is a form of procrastination.  (Better not go there.)

As soon as the sun comes out, a whole new crop of weeds will spring forth and I will have to get back to my futile attempt to get my gardens in shape.  My Highly Effective Sister and her Mister do not seem to have these problems.  They keep their garden in shape, get their bills paid on time, host frequent dinner parties, own numerous rental properties, travel constantly (for fun), and hold down Important Jobs!  And they each have graduate degrees.  It's enough to make me want to get out of the gene pool, except it is too late:  Hubby and I have already reproduced, ensuring that the next generation of Highly Ineffective People, like weeds, will keep the entropy going.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved